I’m in over my head.
“Shh. Shh. It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.” The words are a stream of babble that don’t really mean anything. I look back up the slope I’ve come down. I can see the edge of the trail, but nothing else.
The phone. They have 9-1-1 here, right? I fumble for the pockets in my coat before I remember this isn’t mine. My phone is in the pocket of my actual coat, which I left at the base before they sent us up on the snowmobiles. The realization is like a punch to the gut and for a minute I can barely breathe.
When I finally manage a decent inhale again, I scream.
“Help! Help!” My voice echoes through the trees. Fear grips my throat, strangling my calls. We need more than help. Weneed a rescue. Austin is in bad shape. He still hasn’t spoken, but his left leg is bent in a sickening position, and there’s something wrong with his arm, because he keeps trying to flex his hand like he wants to lift it off the snow, then lets it fall to the ground again. Dislocated, maybe. I’ve seen it before. You hang around skiers going fast downhill long enough, you’ve seen most injuries. Sprained wrists, dislocated shoulders. Broken noses, ribs and collarbones, torn knees.
But I’ve never seen them all at once.
Austin makes a wet choking sound. Spinal injury be damned. Who cares if he can’t walk later if he asphyxiates on his own blood now? I roll him gently on his side and he coughs up a mouthful of blood onto the gritty snow.
“Help!” I call again. There have to be more people coming down. If Tara said we could go, she’ll be telling others the same. I can’t see skiers on the trail, but one of them should hear me. While I keep calling, I pull my coat off, slipping it behind Austin’s back to keep him from rolling away. He makes a choked sobbing sound when I move him.
“I know. I know,” I murmur. “They’re coming. Just hold tight. Someone’s going to hear us and bring help.” I pull my helmet off and add it to the pile, squeezing it between the coat and the rock that stopped Austin’s headlong fall into the brush. There’s a smear of red on the stone and I look away, trying not to think about what part of Austin’s body left that behind.
“Bear,” he says. The word is frighteningly weak. I brush some of the blond strands of his hair out of his face, tucking them behind one ear. The ends are coated in blood. Not that long ago, my fingers were tangled in that same hair, pulling it back so he could take my dick a little bit easier. How did we get from there to here?
“Bear?” he says again, and my heart stops, because I realize his warning before had nothing to do with a random bear on theside of the trail. He was saying my name. The stupid nickname that was only between us in the dark hours of the night. He wasn’t shouting a warning, he was calling for help. Calling for me.
“Yeah,” I say, fingers and voice shaking equally hard as I brush at his hair some more. “Yeah. I’m here. Don’t worry, the ski patrol is on their way.”
Are they, though? No one even knows we’re down here. It feels like we sit in the snow forever. The cold and wet soak through my ass, because even waterproof cutting-technology pants can’t stay waterproof forever when you’re sitting in melting snow with a man’s head in your lap as he struggles to breathe. The sound goes from wet to shallow. The blood that was initially flowing from his nose slows, but a trickle slides from the corner of his mouth, and he coughs again, whimpering softly at the end. The whole time, I replay those last seconds in my head over and over. The race. The trail. A tight corner. Nothing we haven’t battled through before. So what was different this time?
Finally, the hiss of skis on snow comes from somewhere overhead. I suck in the biggest lungful of air I can and let out a scream loud enough to make the snow in the trees shake.
There’s a pause, and I can’t even hear the swish of the skier anymore. Tears threaten to spill over from my eyes. I can’t leave him here. But if I don’t go back up to the trail, no one will ever find us.
“Hello?”
I sag at the sound of someone’s voice.
“Yes! Yes, we’re down here! Help!”
A head appears at the edge of the trail, then another.
“Cedric?” It’s Matthieu.
“Help! Austin needs help! Get the ski patrol.”
There’s some conversation between Matthieu and his companion, but only a few seconds later, Matthieu has his skisoff and planted at the edge of the trail in the X shape that signals danger or an accident. He slides down the hill toward me, and I can only hope whoever was with him has called for help.
“Calice.” Matthieu swears in French as he falls next to me. He’s breathing hard from his run, but his cheeks are pale as he stares down at Austin’s bloody face.
“He fell,” I say, voice cracking now that someone knows we’re here. “We were racing and he went over the side. I don’t know. I didn’t see, but he—” The words end on a sob. I can’t say it. I don’t even know the extent of his injuries. He hasn’t spoken in minutes and his breathing is getting shallower and slower. I keep petting his hair like he’s a puppy.
By the time the ski patrol arrives, following the same treacherous path down through the trees, Austin is completely still. I’ve got one hand inside the front of his coat because I need to feel the beat of his heart against my palm to convince myself he’s not already dead. His body is so cold, even through the layers of insulation and microfibre meant to keep him warm. I find myself murmuring to him over and over to hang on, until the words don’t even mean much in my head.
The ski patrol takes forever getting him back up onto the trail. In theory, they must be trained for this, but most of their job involves loading up weekenders who have sprained a thumb or broken a leg. One of them has a radio he uses to contact the base, using words like “air transport” and “catastrophic injury.” They strap Austin onto the rigid sled that doubles as a back board. Another of the ski patrollers says something to me, but it takes a second to tear my eyes away off Austin’s motionless form.
“What?” I ask.
“I said are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”
I don’t know how much time has passed since the moment Austin vanished over the edge of the trail. Minutes, maybe.Hours, possibly. If someone said I’d been sitting by this bloody rock for days until help arrived, I’d believe them. Coming back to my body to check for injuries feels like it takes almost as long.
“I’m fine,” I say, though I wobble as I push to stand and have to plant a hand on the rock to keep from toppling over. My foot is asleep inside my boot. Not much room to wiggle my toes or ankle to get the blood flowing again. But when I let go of the rock and lift my hand free, there’s plenty of blood on my palm. Only it’s not mine. Austin left it there.
